Some words and pictures about ApacheCon 2008 in New Orleans.
Opening Eye Candy
This one’s not too far north of LA.
Like many hotel windows, mine had a view occupied in large part by other
hotel windows. On the first morning when I got up, though, they weren’t boring.
The Conference
Let’s be controversial: I think the really important tech conferences in
the world of Open Source are
OSCON,
RubyConf,
PyCon, and
ApacheCon. The Linux conferences seem
to have become very biz-focused, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
In that lofty context, ApacheCon is maybe struggling a little, compared to the
others.
But there are a lot of good things.
First, the conference has a hefty travel-assist budget,
so a lot of people are there on merit rather than their employer’s expense...
I must open with heartfelt thanks to all of you for the
passion and drama and rhetoric and personality you’ve offered each other and
the world, in the political-theatre context, for the last couple of years.
Unless the tools of Statistics
have suddenly become empty shells, Mr. Obama will be your forty-fourth
President; I’ve
said my piece on why this is
probably a good thing. Here’s some more.
Barack himself, if you ignore the ethnic glamour,
the remarkable gift of gab, and those cartoonist-friendly ears
(they’re not the same size!), seems little more on the face of it than a
mainstream-Democratic-party politico with unusually good management and
marketing skills.
The Movement
But I think there are two things about this election that are special.
First, the Obama campaign,...
This is not of the remotest interest to anyone who doesn’t live in
New Westminster, a
small city near Vancouver that doesn’t think of itself as a suburb.
It turns out my old friend and colleague
Matt Laird (who, by the way, provides
hosting for this
Web site as a sideline job) is running for city council
there (the election’s on the 15th).
I’d think voting for Matt would be a no-brainer. He’s bright and
honest and super-energetic and is totally dedicated to civic involvement;
always pursuing one good cause or another. Near as I can tell, his motives
are more or less pure public-spiritedness. This package sounds like exactly
what you’d want in your local government,......
Of the Lost
Souls I mean. It was so much fun it shouldn’t be legal. This post is
here so I can post a funny picture of myself and meditate, once again, on
the profusion of digital recordings of, well, everything.
Here’s your host:
Photo credit: Sue, one of my band-mates.
You can also get the flavor of the event with a
Flickr
Search; I recommend following that link, some of the pix are fantastic.
And there’s
video
too—on one of the fire-show sequences, you can hear the band.
I found
one that
shows our band in action.
I’ve come to expect that everything public and quite a bit of what’s
private too is subject to capture and posting. Last night it got on my nerves
a bit, for the first time. What happened was, after the parade part and the
accompany-the-fire-show part, the...
I mean
Parade
of the Lost Souls, which happens next Saturday October 25th on Commercial
Drive here in Vancouver.
I’ve
paraded before; once
again I’ll be part of
Russell Shumsky’s West-African drum
ensemble, layin’ down the dance beats.
Assuming the weather co-operates, it’s a blast; come on out and......
Voting via ongoing October 20th, 2008 at 10:00
Yes, last week we had a
Canadian election.
Not much changed, so it wasn’t a very satisfying experience. For the first
time, I’m warming up to the notion of tinkering with our voting system.
What Happened
Before the election, we had a
Conservative minority government, with
the
Liberals,
New Democrats, and
Bloc Québécois on the other
side of the aisle. After the election, we had... well, the same thing. Only
with more Tories and fewer Liberals.
In practical terms, this probably strengthens the Tories’ hands, because it
takes all three other parties to unite against them to force another election,
and Canadians aren’t going to be in the mood for one for a couple years at
least.
The most disappointing thing is that the Tories are completely Part Of The
Problem when it comes to...
On a recent weekend we took the
Seabus over to
Lonsdale Quay. The
Seabus is both romantic and reliable, a rare enough combination in this
world. On the way back, I took a photo of the big container-handling
cranes.
I don’t know what proportion of Canada’s import/export business these
things wrangle but the numbers are big; this is the busiest port in Canada (and
also on the whole West Coast of North America) measured by tonnage.
William Gibson fans: the closing scenes of Spook Country are
set right around......
London via ongoing October 14th, 2008 at 10:00
I spent four days there last week and enjoyed it. Herewith words and
pictures.
I stayed at the
London Bridge Hotel, a
perfectly decent place just at the south end of that bridge. Since
my visit last May, they’ve
upgraded the WiFi and made it free; good on ’em; plus the breakfast is
excellent.
The City
Mornings, I walked northward across the river and considered The City,
which is the part of the city at the north end of the bridge. It’s under
construction.
Well, for the moment anyhow. Times are troubled, obviously; the newspaper
headlines scream crisis and panic every morning and afternoon. I spent time
talking to finance people, Sun customers, worried people but not the names you’re
seeing in those panicky headlines.
London is about money and it’s been about money for a...
Canada’s
40th
General Election is tomorrow. I’ll be voting
Green; here’s why.
The Tories
The Conservative party has been running the country, as a minority
government, for the past few years. They’re not very lovable but they’ve been
mostly reasonably competent.
On the other hand, they’re awful on environmental issues, they
have a sprinkling of Republican clones who’d turn hard-right given the
slightest chance, and Prime Minister Harper is a control freak whose
Cabinet-level team isn’t that impressive.
In our local riding, they’re irrelevant, there’s no chance a Tory could
get elected here. In fact, we’ll represent a net loss for them, since the
Liberal we elected last time crossed the floor to join the government.
The Liberals
I kind of like Liberal leader...
The
numbers, considered carefully,
make an Obama win look like a safer and safer bet.
Herewith a Canadian spectator’s opinions as to why this is
and why it’s a good thing.
Why?
Seems pretty obvious to me. Most Americans didn’t pay much attention to the
election until the conventions. Then 50 million people watched the
big speeches and first debate.
Prior to that, most people had seen pictures and brief film-clips of Obama
and, and had been aware of some of the Republican framing efforts: “He’s this
young black guy with a Muslim middle name and big ears who gives fiery
speeches and whose pastor was a kook. Weird. Maybe dangerous.”
Then Obama delivered a nice even-toned convention speech.
And during
the debate he was this perfectly normal American politician, saying all...
I’m speaking at
FOWA and will be a London
resident October 6th through 9th. Any meetups or drinkups or geekfests or other events I
shouldn’t......
It’s on
Main Street
near 14th Ave. They make a damn fine chicken
Shawarma.
The place is a little odd inside; apparently once a French bistro,
the shift to Middle Eastern cuisine seems not to have involved a redesign.
But it’s cheery and comfy and lets you be part of the Main Street scene.
Hey, while writing this, I learned that the dude who makes the awesome
lunches is “Mori” Momenzadeh Tameh and
is little political issue all by
himeself.
Anyhow, you can’t beat it for a quick tasty nutritious bite on that part of
Main; which is saying something given the number of nearby......
Treeset via ongoing September 6th, 2008 at 10:00
Being a photo of the sun approaching the horizon with no clouds
to serve as a canvas for its setting rays. But there’s a little tree.
I went out to take pictures of the sunset and it just doesn’t work right
without clouds. Still, I got any number of ridiculously-dramatic shots of the
ripe prairie grasses in sideways light. I’ll run one or......
Horizon via ongoing September 5th, 2008 at 10:00
Being a photograph of a Saskatchewan hayfield and a cloudy sky.
This taken within a couple of minutes of that shot of the
storm-beset barn. Damn,
it was......
Being a photo of the sun’s rays spilling over the mountains onto
Howe Sound, taken from a
boat pulling out of
Horseshoe Bay.
There seem to be a lot of random pretty-decent nature shots in the August
folder; I’ll run ’em till I run out, because the Internet can’t have too......
I’ve always had a weakness for cowboy fashion, and when we visit
Saskatchewan, we always drop by the big
Cowtown store in Regina to do our
bit for the
Prairie economy, not that it needs it what with grains and potash and
petroleum all booming.
The store is pretty big, but it’s the smallest of the buildings clustered
around the
Masterfeeds parking lot.
Masterfeeds actually owns & operates Cowtown, and downstairs there’s
more animal food than anything else, along with a weird assortment of exotic
pets; you can pick up a tarantula or chameleon along with your horse chow.
Upstairs though, it’s Western Wear.
I like denim and checks and plaids and, and I’ve never understood why you’d
want buttons on a shirt when you can have pearl- or black-fronted snaps.
Jeans
There’s a rule...
I have always for some reason, been sweet on donkeys. I’ve published some
fetching donkey
photographs in this space, and have visited the
Donkey Sanctuary in Devon
on three separate occasions.
Herewith a donkey-centric book review, travel recommendation,
and French word that needs a better English translation.
Donkey Wisdom
That’s the book: in full,
The Wisdom of Donkeys: Finding Tranquility in a Chaotic World
by Andy Merrifield; a present last Christmas from my Mother, who knows I like
them.
Merrifield likes donkeys a whole lot, perhaps more than I do, and has
wrapped a thin and enjoyable (note that I do not say “but enjoyable”;
thin is good) philosophical discourse around the species. He has plentiful
recourse to every literary and scriptural donkey that you’ve ever heard...
Cottage Life, unless yours is a mansion with full-time staff, is mostly
maintenance, with a few intervening breaks for nature or beer.
I’m neither deft nor mechanically gifted, but the right industrial chemicals
can make up for that.
I include the view shot to illustrate the story, but you have to enlarge it
first, and when you do there are other points
of interest. The pale-brown line on the water, more or less in the middle of
the picture, is a log boom; trees that have been cut somewhere near the ocean
and are being hauled off to the mill by a tugboat, which you can
actually see towards the left side of the picture, a black-and-white dot on
the water among the pine needles.
You can also see our dock partly behind the bushes at the bottom. We get
15 feet or more of tide, so...
Its full name is
Car-Free Vancouver Day and it
happened last Sunday. We hadn’t been planning to go but stumbled in more or
less accidentally and it was good fun. It gave me an excuse to take
pictures of people; something I’m too shy to do except in a crowd.
The place—at least the Main Street location near our place—was jam-packed.
There were a few merchants set up, doing a
roaring trade, it looked like. I bet they’ll all be out next......
I think that life in general and this space in particular would benefit
from more of an outdoor flavor; words and pictures rooted in Nature.
Our recent
acquisition of a piece of
Keats Island,
should make this easier. Welcome to
Cottage Life.
Any piece of Pacific Northwest waterfront is going to include a lot of logs.
A few trees naturally fall into the ocean when they die, but most of the
logs that drift up on our beach represent little errors and omissions in the
logging industry. Time was, you could make a living scooping these up
and selling them back to the foresters; there was even
a TV series about
it.
I believe that the rock holding the log up represents
the extreme northernmost point of Keats Island.
Here’s a close-up of another; they become more visually interesting as...
In
Arts/Photos/Cameras,
Cameras,
The World/Cottage Life,
Cottage Life,
The World/Places/Canada/Howe Sound,
Howe Sound,
Photos,
Canada,
Arts,
The World,
Places
Two photos of not much in particular, but with explanations.
Explanation:
Girls
and Trucks.
This is another part of Main Street, which is partly explained in the first
paragraph of
Main Art.
I tried this last one in black and white, and it looked sort of stark and
strong and lovely, but then I turned the colour back on and liked it better.
I guess I’ll never be a Real......
Now we’re real Canadians.
As of June 11th, Lauren and I own a cottage on
Keats Island (Wikipedia,
map,
keatsisland.net).
The consequences include a sudden interest in remote-area
Internet options.
For context on the neighborhood, Canadian cottage culture, and pretty pix,
check out Howe Sound
day, which documents a trip we took mostly to look at the property.
That was almost six months ago; time moves slower in cottage country.
The two pictures in that piece identified as being from the north shore of
Keats are taken from the cottage. Here’s another.
Why?
When we looked at the place we liked the view, we liked the general setup,
we liked the accessibility from Vancouver, the price seemed OK, and there was
nothing obviously wrong.
While we were over there some of the party had a nap...
Last week I took a brief trip to San Francisco, and managed to escape for a
walk. Lots of buildings had interesting shadows on them.
The old parts of San Francisco seem to age with grace, by and......
Being a picture of one, with some other things.
It’s a window. Some of the people and things are reflected in it, others
seen through it. Honestly I don’t know which is which. If you’re from Vancouver and the
propeller rings a bell, you’ve probably walked by it down on Granville......
No, there isn’t one as I write this. But within the last few weeks, Hamas
offered a ten-year
truce covering the whole region and (separately it seems) a
six-month
truce covering just Gaza. The next story after that’s headline is
“Girl killed in
fresh Gaza clashes”, sigh. Seems to me it might be worth a try.
You don’t have to like Hamas to think this. Let’s stipulate that Hamas is
full of medievalist religious crazies on the one hand, and old-fashioned
Jew-haters on the other. Let’s acknowledge that they refuse to back away from
their theoretical goal of wiping out Israel.
(Let’s also acknowledge that the ugliness is
not entirely one-sided.)
But still, why wouldn’t you
publicly accept the truce offer, if only (especially if you think they’ll
break it) for...
I had a little slack in the schedule heading for the airport, so when I
left work, I stopped on to photograph a marsh.
This is just north of Sun’s Menlo Park Campus, Route 84 along the edge of
San Francisco Bay between Marsh and
Willow Roads; as that first road’s name suggests, there’s a great big salt
marsh there.
On days when the water’s a little lower than usual, it the smell can get
pretty rich.
Just up the road a bit is
Bayfront
Park, which is an awfully nice place to go for a walk. I climbed a
hill and took a shot up the bayside.
North of Menlo Park, if there’s anything interesting between 101 and the water
I haven’t found it; plasticky housing developments and an occasional outburst
of high-tech, in particular Oracle’s Dark Towers.
Note the line of transmission...
On the plane home from San Francisco, I was sitting among a bunch of
Tibetans who’d been down from Vancouver for the big protests around the
Olympic Torch relay. I was honoured to be with them.
The day before, I’d been following the action mostly on Twitter: check out
@teamtibet, where they were helping
organize the protests. Twitter, it’s an activist’s dream. But I couldn’t find
online video or photos of Majora Carter carrying the torch and the Tibetan
flag. Oh, and China,
here’s a reality we honkies internalized way back when: Imperialism, it can do
wonders for your commercial position and in distracting the citizens from the
regime’s domestic failings. But on the other hand, the bad PR is just
never gonna go away. So, you want the upside, you just gotta suck it
up...
I had business in Chicago early last week, and managed to spend a musical
evening with
Patricia Barber;
this is not hard to arrange there, and I recommend it.
Chicago at dusk. Most drivers get a little paranoid
when you roll down your window in traffic and lean out with a camera, but mine was cool.
I’ve written here repeatedly about Ms Barber; I might be prepared to argue
that she’s the greatest living jazz performer. In any case, she’s clearly the
one that touches me the closest. I have a lot of her records and have
been to
in one live show and look for her
on TV.
She’s a Chicagoan and has a semi-permanent gig Mondays at the
Green Mill cocktail lounge there.
It’s small (capacity 140), dark, intimate, and a little on the grungy side;
totally the right place for jazz.
The...
Friday Slide Scan #34 (wow, it’s been over a year) is from early mid-1994;
views of Paris, including a couple I bet you haven’t seen.
That time I was staying in big hotel at Porte Maillot; as the view reveals,
one of the few really tall buildings in Paris, which is aesthetically a good
thing, unless you’re a Jane-Jacobs-ian density-is-good type, which I am.
I thought the view looking down from way up there was charming.
I was traveling around on the Métro, the only way to go. I still
have a few tickets, Lord knows how many years old, in my wallet, for
sentimental reasons. The Métro has its own smell, like nothing else in the
world. Anyhow, there’s this one line where there a bunch of stations named
after foreign dignitaries. One is called
George
V, after an English king...
Remarks from the photo world, interspersed with uplifting
Hawai’i snapshots. It’s about emotion, not just technology.
Emotion
You want emotion? Check out
grief
at Arlington, specifically Greg Heins’ take on this remarkable John Moore
photo. Also take in the illustrated featured comment, and then Mike Johnson
uses this to launch a
discussion
on cropping and its ethics.
They call Maui “The Valley Isle”; this is a view from
the side of
Haleakalā looking down at
the Kihei end of the valley. I saw a tough
Hawaiian-looking kid
whose T-shirt said “Valley isle not haole isle”.
Reality
Since I’ve just quoted Mike Johnson, here are a couple other things from
the last month that are worth reading:
Funny That Way
and Look Left, Look Right.
I think that all of us, as digital...